It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time and decided it was finally time. Yesterday, I launched a new web comic “Code Monkey Kung Fu”. After being a programer for more than ten years, I’ve come across quite a few hilarious situations and will be drawing on them for inspiration. I also have a four kids, so they will probably produce ......

As some may have noticed, I have taken a liking to Ruby (and Rails in particular) quite a bit recently. This last weekend I spoke at the NYC Code Camp on a comparison of ASP.NET and Rails as well as an intro to Entity Framework talk. I am speaking at RubyNation in April and have submitted to other ruby conferences around the area and I am also doing ......

I have been working on a Refcard for DZone over the past months and it is finally published. The refcard gives you a intro into the basics of the Entity Framework 4 and can be used as a quick reference. Please take a moment to download it and check it out. You can download it at: http://refcardz.dzone.com/r... ......

There are several attributes available when using code first with the Entity Framework 4 CTP5 Code First option. When working with strings you can use [MaxLength(length)] to control the length and [Required] will work on all properties. But there are a few things missing. By default all string will be created using unicode so you will get nvarchar instead ......

I have been using EF4 CTP5 with code first and I really like the new code. One issue I was having however, was cascading deletes is on by default. This may come as a surprise as using Entity Framework with anything but code first, this is not the case. I ran into an exception with some one-to-many relationships I had: Introducing FOREIGN KEY constraint ......

I have moved this project from CodePlex to GitHub at https://github.com/danemorg... I have a posted a project on Codeplex at http://efrepository.codeple... It is a T4 template to give you a data layer that follows Repository and Unit of Work patterns that is also ready for Dependency Injection (DI). DI frameworks allow you to build code ......

I attended my first CodeStock this year and in short it was awesome. Like 100 billion hot dogs awesome. The travel there was crazy to say the least, but I met lots of new people, had a session go well and recorded 3 podcasts. So that is the short version. If you are on twitter and either follow me or followed the #codestock hash tag, you probably saw ......

If you are doing any work with Entity Framework and custom WCF services in EFv1, everything works great. As soon as you jump to EFv4, you may find yourself getting odd errors that you can’t seem to catch. The problem is almost always has something to do with the new lazy loading feature in Entity Framework 4. With Entity Framework 1, you didn’t have ......

In almost every talk I have done on Entity Framework I get questions on how to do custom SSDL or SQL when using model first development. Quite a few of these questions have required custom changes to the SSDL, which of course can be a problem if it is getting auto generated. Luckily, there is a tool that can help. In the Visual Studio Gallery on MSDN, ......

For those who don't already know, yesterday I received my first Microsoft MVP Award in Data Platform Development. With less than 5,000 MVPs in the world overall and about 20 in the Data Platform category, saying I am honored would be an understatement. From the first time I spoke at a code camp, I was totally hooked and have had a blast travelling around ......